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Blast kills3 policemen in Georgia

GORI, Georgia — Three police officers were killed and 26 people were wounded Tuesday when a powerful car bomb exploded outside a regional police headquarters in the central Georgian city of Gori.The authorities described the attack as a "terrorist act."

The force of the blast left a deep crater in the ground and badly damaged the police building.

The wounded were rushed to the main hospital in Gori, where 10 of them were listed in serious condition, a hospital spokesman said.

Officials said that the attack was being treated as an act of terrorism and that a criminal investigation had been opened.

Gori is located about 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, west of Tbilisi, and 30 kilometers south of Tskhinvali, the main city in the breakaway region of South Ossetia where Georgian troops have clashed with separatist forces.

There was no claim of responsibility for the attack, but local residents believe it is linked to tensions over the status of South Ossetia, one of the regions of Georgia that claimed independence in the early 1990s after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

South Ossetian officials immediately denied any connection to the attack and warned Georgia not to blame the separatist republic.

"We will regret if Georgian politicians seriously consider such an unbelievable possibility," the South Ossetian representative in Moscow, Dmitry Medoyev, told the Interfax news agency. "It is a clumsy attempt to discredit South Ossetia."

The police headquarters at Gori has administrative responsibility for the western Georgian region of Shida Kartli, which includes South Ossetia.

The attack came a week after the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, announced a proposal to grant wide autonomy to South Ossetia in exchange for acknowledgment by the authorities there of Georgia's sovereignty over the region.

The territory's leader, Eduard Kokoity, rejected the proposal, but the speaker of the region's Parliament, Stanislav Kochiyev, said it warranted "analysis."

Saakashvili, who came to power last year after leading a peaceful revolt against the former leader of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, has vowed to bring South Ossetia and other wayward regions of his country back under the control of the central government in Tbilisi.